The first shots of SharePoint 2010 are live on the internet. Just like everyone who started working with the beta of MOSS2007 in late 2006 I’m very curious about the new thing, now called “SharePoint twenty ten”.
I’ve summarized some of the new functional features that come available in the new SharePoint version.
1. The new interface. This will be quite a shock. Compare this to the change from Office 2003 to Office 2007. SharePoint 2010 comes with a ribbon with all the actions you can perform in one view. Luckily you do not have to change to this new look & feel directly when you upgrade to SharePoint 2010. You can upgrade to SharePoint 2010 and benefit from all the new functionalities but stick (for a while) with the old interface. This way the technical owner of the SharePoint environment (e.g. the IT department) and the business owner of the SharePoint environment (e.g. Marketing & Communication) can decide on their own when they want to upgrade to SharePoint 2010.
2. Uploading and using Images. A small but annoying thing in SharePoint 2007 (and also in lots of other content management systems) is the fact the before you can use an image on a page, you first have to make it available in an image library. Although fairly logical, this is something that you come across in every end-user training. People forget to first put the image in a library or get lost with all the pop-ups you get when uploading and selecting an image while creating a page.
SharePoint 2010 fixes this with a simple “Add Picture” pop-up that incorporates the browse button to the physical location of a picture on your PC and a dropdown list of the available (image) libraries in the current site you’re working in. By clicking the Ok button, the image is uploaded to the selected library and placed on the page you’re working on. Simple but very effective!!
3. Usage logging. SharePoint 2007 came with a very basic support for showing reports about the usage of a SharePoint environment. And the information that was available, could only be accessed through a standard SharePoint maintenance page. It was not possible to access the usage information from the object model. In SharePoint 2010 this is changed. Usage logging is stored in a separate database and is now accessible for custom development. This means that functional requests I’ve heard a lot like “I want a webpart showing the most used services” or “I want to give users a personalized list with ‘My Most Used Pages’” now can be realized with information stored by SharePoint. Examples of things you can log are Page requests, Search query usage and Rating usage.
These are only some of the new features that come with SharePoint 2010. Other promising features that will come available with the new SharePoint version are:
· Multiple browser support
· Possible usage of Silverlight
· Integration with Visio documents for easy workflow processes
· a SharePoint best practices analyser
· And probably lots and lots more…
Can’t wait to get my hands on the beta release
SharePoint Products and Technologies: 2010 (Technical Preview) Developer Documentation has been made available for download:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=94afe886-3b20-4bc9-9a0d-acd8cd232c24&displaylang=en
Within this download there is some documentation offering early insight into the ribbon functionality and the SDK.
Yesterday I tried to export a webpart from a SharePoint page in order to see the contents of this web part and understand the working of it. After I clicked on Export, I got an annoying message that the page took too long to save. Either click OK or Cancel. In both situations I could not get the webpart to export.
All my software is up to date. Maybe a little bit too much up to date, as I found out. IE7 worked fine, after installing IE8 it stopped working. It seems IE 8 uses Ajax differently than IE7.
A way to overcome the problem is to go to Tools, Internet Options, Advanced, Security and uncheck Enable native XMLHTTP support.
Note that this is a work around (allthough it will enable you to keep working).
Van maandag 13 tot en met donderdag 16 juli hebben 5 mensen van Mavention een Silverlight training gevolgd. Voor een aantal van ons was dit de eerste officiële kennismaking met Silverlight, voor anderen was het een opfrissing van reeds aanwezige kennis.
Microsoft Silverlight is een multi-platform runtime (browser plug-in) voor browsergebaseerde internetapplicaties met animaties, vectorgraphics en videoplaybackmogelijkheden van Windows Presentation Foundation(WPF).
Met Silverlight kunnen wij Rich Internet Applications(RIA’s) ontwikkelen waarmee we binnen SharePoint documenten, nieuwsberichten, contactpersonen, taken en discussies op een aantrekkelijke en intuïtieve manier kunnen tonen. Dit onafhankelijk van het platform of de browser van de gebruiker.
De volgende onderdelen zijn tijdens deze 4 dagen behandeld:
Introduction: What is Silverlight, XAML, Visual Studio 2008, Microsoft Expression Blend, Application Development
Controls: Build In Controls, Silverlight Toolkit, Events, Fonts, Brushes, Resources
Animations
UI Customization: Styling, Skinning & Theming
Data Binding: Binding to Collections, Binding to Objects , Converters, DataBinding from Code, Data Validation, DataBinding in Blend
Control Creation: User Controls, Dependency Properties, Custom Controls, Skin-able Custom Controls, Control Inheritance
Programmability: Reading & Writing Files, Quota's, IsolatedStorageSettings, OpenFileDialog, LINQ, Xml Reader & Writer, Asynchronous Programming
Networking: HTTP (Download & Upload), SOAP (XML WebServices & WCF), ADO.NET Data Services, RSS, JSON, Cross Domain Communication
Browser Integration: Access HTML DOM from Silverlight, Popup a Browser Window, Reading and Writing Cookies, Call JavaScript functions from Silverlight, Call Silverlight from JavaScript, Handling Events, Evaluating Javascript from .NET Code, DOM Bridge Security Model
Media: Audio, Video, Encoding, DeepZoom
Deployment: Version Control, Custom Initialization Parameters, Transparency, Splash Screen, Error Handling, Customize the Install Experience , IIS MIME Types, Disable XAP Caching, Full-screen Mode, Right Mouse Click, Globalization, Obfuscation.
Voor mij als SharePoint vormgever is dit dé manier om bijvoorbeeld visueel aantrekkelijke nieuwsberichten te ontwikkelen. Met standaard SharePoint loop ik al snel tegen de beperkingen van XSL en CSS aan en kost het relatief veel tijd om een mooie vormgeving neer te zetten. Door Silverlight in te zetten kan ik in minder tijd een veel rijkere user experience realiseren!
http://www.silverlighttraining.nl/
It's an honor to be able to say that I'm officially a Microsoft Certified Master for SharePoint and I’m the Go-Kart Master of SPR3.
I can remember myself laughing while reading the announcement of the MCM for SharePoint. My first thoughts were, out of my league, not enough budget. But one of our guys was so excited about this certification that he came up with the plan to use our bonus (it still hurts) as fund for the certification. So we decided to go for it and apply for the Master program.
Our first milestone was the moment we got accepted for the training. After being accepted we got the pre-reading list (which is a long list) and so we started studying right away. During this time the first blog posts started to surface on the internet telling us how hard this training is and what a great experience it is. This made me think that I would never pass on the first try. On May 31st the adventure began, together with my colleague Marcel van der Lem, two other Dutch guys (Johan Kroese and Donald Hessing) we flew to Seattle for the moment of truth. Arriving on Saturday we had two days to get used to the time difference, do some shopping and relax a little. Apparently we were lucky because the weather in Seattle was terrific (they told me it usually rains in Seattle). This lasted until Monday the 1st of June because from that moment on we were pretty much locked up in a classroom with 16 of the worlds best SharePoint people and one of the worlds best SharePoint ladies. Our days were long and nights were short. All we did was listen, learn and practice hands on labs. No time for work, mail or sightseeing. We literally saw every aspect of SharePoint and each attendee was provided with its own blade server for the labs. The general comment on the blades was “I’ve got to get me one of these”. During these three weeks we had some of the worlds best teachers for such a small group. All sessions were very interactive and that resulted in a lot of interesting discussions. Trust me when I say that going to all the top SharePoint conferences in a year doesn’t come close to this experience. I ate Chinese food for almost three weeks and I managed to finish two 1,2 KG bags of M&M’s. You can image that I was more than happy knowing we would fly home the day after the QualLab.
Cheers,
Robert Jaakke
